the party!" muttered Saint Just. "Barere is
the only man whom Robespierre has forgiven." We have an account of
this singular repast from one of the guests. Robespierre condemned the
senseless brutality with which Hebert had conducted the proceedings
against the Austrian woman, and, in talking on that subject, became
so much excited that he broke his plate in the violence of his
gesticulation. Barere exclaimed that the guillotine had cut a diplomatic
knot which it might have been difficult to untie. In the intervals
between the Beaune and the Champagne, between the ragout of thrushes
and the partridge with truffles, he fervently preached his new political
creed. "The vessel of the revolution," he said, "can float into port
only on waves of blood. We must begin with the members of the National
Assembly and of the Legislative Assembly. That rubbish must be swept
away."

As he talked at table he talked in the Convention. His peculiar style
of oratory was now formed. It was not altogether without ingenuity and
liveliness. But in any other age or country it would have been thought
unfit for the deliberations of a grave assembly, and still more
unfit for state papers. It might, perhaps, succeed at a meeting of a
Protestant Association in Exeter Hall, at a Repeal dinner in Ireland,
after men had well drunk, or in an American oration on the fourth of
July. No legislative body would now endure it. But in France, during
the reign of the Convention, the old laws of composition were held in as
much contempt as the old government or the old creed. Correct and noble
diction belonged, like the etiquette of Versailles and the solemnities
of Notre Dame, to an age which had passed away. Just as a swarm of
ephemeral constitutions, democratic, directorial, and consular,
sprang from the decay of the ancient monarchy; just as a swarm of new
superstitions, the worship of the Goddess of Reason, and the fooleries
of the Theo-philanthropists, sprang from the decay of the ancient
Church; even so, out of the decay of the ancient French eloquence sprang
new fashions of eloquence, for the understanding of which new grammars
and dictionaries were necessary. The same innovating spirit which
altered the common phrases of salutation, which turned hundreds of Johns
and Peters into Scaevolas and Aristogitons, and which expelled Sunday
and Monday, January and February, Lady-day and Christmas, from the
calendar, in order to substitute Decadi and Primidi, Niv